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More than 60 people showed up to a community meeting held in Kingsboro last week, driven to attend by concerns about a $19 billion, 900-megawatt data center the county is considering allowing to set up shop in Edgecombe County.

“It was a really good group of people,” said Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Katey Zimmerman. “It was held at one of the local churches, and the place was packed.”

Katey said the purpose of the meeting was for people to learn about the potential impacts of data centers, about Energy Storage Solutions’ proposal and inspire those concerned about it to participate in county commissioners’ meetings when the project is discussed.

Dr. Rania Masri, Director of Organizing and Policy with North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, was the main speaker at the community meeting and focused on known impacts and concerns to be addressed.

Some of those concerns include the fact that Edgecombe County is one of several counties in the state in “severe drought,” as designated by the North Department of Environmental Quality earlier this week. While DEQ is warning the county to eliminate non-essential water use and urging conservation, county commissioners are considering a project that could use up to 5 million gallons of water per day in its operations, Katey said.

The plan is to use City of Rocky Mount water, flowing from the Tar River through a water treatment plant to the proposed data center. There’s no clear understanding of how this impact the residents’ utility rates — a problem that’s only come up after the fact where data centers have been built.

“Surrounding communities where data centers have been constructed, within a year, their utilities are way up, and at the same time, their property values are going down,” Katey said. “Another concerning part is most of these data centers use water to cool, and while a lot evaporates, what’s left is super-heated and has to be cooled. The process to cool it is to use F-gases, known to contain PFAs, and it’s unknown whether the water will be sent back to the Rocky Mount treatment plant — and if they could even treat those PFAs — or released straight into the Tar River.”

Assistant Edgecombe County Manager Mike Matthews represented the county at the meeting and appeared to be supportive of the project, Katey said, comparing it to xAI’s South Memphis data center that Edgecombe County commissioners visited earlier this year. That facility has received much criticism from the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center for smog released by its gas-powered turbines in an already heavily polluted South Memphis.

“It was really great that Mr. Matthews showed up to the meeting, but I feel like he could have listened to people’s concerns more,” Katey said.

Edgecombe County’s Board of Commissioners was set to vote on the sale of the property in the Kingsboro Industrial Park at the Dec. 1 commissioners meeting, where several people spoke about the project’s potential harms during public comments. One was Jim Wrenn, a longtime resident of Kingsboro, who was part of Citizens for Responsible Zoning, which organized in 1995 to prevent an industrial slaughterhouse from being built in Kingsboro. A state historical marker memorializing that victory was dedicated in April 2025.

The vote on the industrial park property was removed from the Dec. 1 agenda, however.

“The commissioners postponed it because the company hasn’t sent the proposal to them,” Katey said. “It seems like the county commissioners have just as little information as we do.”

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